I did not like this book very much as a whole. But that doesn’t mean you won’t. I saw this small book of small poems reviewed in a few places, and I liked the sample poems, so I got it. I was disappointed to find few poems I enjoyed besides the ones I had already read.

I suppose I could comment on poems I didn’t like, and explain why, but I don’t believe there’s much point in a negative “review.” If something in poetry or literature in general isn’t very good, it probably doesn’t need my help to fall out of favor. So I might as well share some of the poems I did enjoy at least mildly.

Here’s one of the samples I read online. I was initially attracted to this poem’s mixture of the concrete and abstract:

PIN PRICK 40

There’s a crack in the floor
that lengthens each time
I step over it.

Its edges resemble
a cut on my hand
that will not heal.

Into it I’ve swept
the names I no longer
write on my calendar.

Although the last stanza is somewhat pleasing, in the end I don’t find these lines very interesting or skillfully constructed. Too many of the poems in Pin Pricks have the quality of vague aphorism, and end up sounding a bit preachy or didactic. They never rise above that level, even when they’re in the context of an interesting image, like this one:

PIN PRICK 59

The puppet cuts its strings
spits at the audience
continues the play
exactly as written.

I do love short pithy poems. I admire Arima’s concept. I just didn’t dig the execution. In the end, I’m not sure what distinguishes his poetry from prose except rearrangement. If anyone else becomes familiar with this little book, I’d enjoy hearing arguments on its behalf. I want to like it simply on the basis of the sad charm in this last poem:

This was one of the most entertaining and quirky books of poetry I’ve read in a while, although I had a difficult time just grasping the surface meaning in quite a few of Laird’s poems. Sometimes shocking, sometimes sad, often funny, always clever, more interested in the sounds of words and tricks of rhythms than in immediate clarity of language; I found myself really enjoying reading the poems out loud to myself, and understanding what Laird was up to a bit more on second or third readings. Also, he gets a kick out of titles with a bit of comic flair, like “Firmhand the Queried,” “The Riddles of the Ardcumber Book,” or “Everybody Wears Socks.”

Here’s a great example of a poem begging to be read out loud. It’s got style, and all the multiplicity of meaning you could ask for.

THE FAULT

You woke me and I stood and looked,
astounded, put my foot in it,

withdrew then what I could of it,
’cause come the revolution

of the earth,
the rule is crockery’s the first

against the wall,
the reverse of which

I’m rapt with as we each
dissemble sleep, but wait,

and listen to the darkness fidget:
it sucks in its gut, lights up,

and swears under its breath
as it struts through the flat,

unzipping the lino, not stopping
until it’s laid down in the slit,

and dared us to watch it,
to hopscotch across its display

of the meanings of cleave,
and accept this is what saves us

from sweeping the kitchen,
and stops us from sleeping.

The progression of my experience reading this poem went something like this. First read: Huh? Let’s try it out loud. Second read: That was great! Such rhythmic! Let me see if I can tease out some meaning. Third read: Hmm, the speaker is being blamed for something, and maybe the person addressed threw something at the wall, and now they’re both pretending to sleep. What else is this about? Fourth read: Cleave is one of those words that means its opposite. Cool. Is there a crack in the floor? Wait, that’s what he put his foot in? That’s the fault. Fault also has several meanings. Is no one being blamed for anything? Why are they dissembling sleep then?

Perhaps this is true of all poets in their ways, but it seems accurate to say Nick Laird is especially eager to examine language’s intricacies and curious to see what he can get words to do. It’s more than that though; he has a way of leaving you maps to follow him, of allowing you to see his gradually better attempts at honesty of expression, that makes him a very likable writer.

I believe he is attempting to pattern some of his own manners of expression in this poem:

THE ROPE BRIDGE

You cross the rope bridge as you talk,
bypass whistling gaps, keep in step with solid wood,
the hand-rail’s grammar, and make it straight over.

No bother. No looking down, no biting your tongue
’til I start and stammer, I pause in the centre,
gape seawards, let fly with these or likewise airy notions,

armsweeps, adjectives, the usual pledges,
obsess on the seawinds, the flightpaths of seabirds,
await balance (these oceans, these edges), but instead

find the head at a loss, at last, for words it can trust.

*

Help me keep a hold of this.
Huddle down and listen with
the man who asks forgiveness,

the one whose swollen tongue has grown
to fill, not fit, his frown, and utters lovesongs,
curses, on its own. Let him begin again.

Let him go back and mind his language.
Listen. He picks on scarecrows, skyscrapers,
scapegoats, smallish lexical mercies.

I think that poem is beautiful. And a little sad, and a little hopeful, and a little resigned to regret in the realization that it is sometimes impossible to say exactly what we mean to say. Also, I would like “smallish lexical mercies” to become part of my own personal quotidian vocabulary.

It would be remiss of me not to mention another significant aspect of Laird’s first collection of poems: his Irish heritage, rendered more singular by being a Northern Irish heritage. Laird is one of the best of the Ulster poets since the titan Heaney. To A Fault is informed throughout by old wounds, the aftermath of war, the strange potency of violence, and the dialogue of the young with those who lived through the Troubles. Irish history, both ancient and modern, is woven into Laird’s composition.

This gives his presentation of certain subjects, especially violence, a wry detachment which can startle in its own way far more than graphic depictions of brutality. I read this last poem last Friday, and today there were attacks in Brussels. Nothing we say about this is sufficient. Poetry is not for the dead.

OŚWIĘCIM

Someone has disturbed a hive.
What swell and gut the air and have
a million different particles, are bees,

which we mistake for wind and seeds,
at first, but stride out of the jittered storm
thrilled and breathlessly unharmed.

Kay Ryan’s poems are like those 3D wooden puzzles I used to see in hobby stores and magazines, carved smoothly out of wood pieces finished with a pleasant-smelling preserver of some kind, stained sometimes dark, sometimes light. I get the same pleasure from her poems I get when I see pictures of things fitting perfectly into other things that don’t have any intended relationship to each other. Ryan’s poems have that very same element of discovery, that revelatory “Hey, look at this! How about that?”

Simply put, she does more with less. Consider this plea:

BLANDEUR

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

It’s as if the words of the English language had been exhausted of their possible combinations, and then Ryan happened along, and with a few flicks of the wrist revealed that in fact this is the way these words were always intended to fit together. Her poems are very short, with no extra words, and come across as breezy yet intense. I don’t remember where, but I read somewhere that if you want to learn how to write short lines, you need to read Kay Ryan.

If it were possible to encounter this poet’s poetry at its purest and most distilled, it might well be in this poem:

THAT WILL TO DIVEST

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning: once
you’ve swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to
divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you’ve begun.

Somehow, even though they are almost all observations or wry statements, her poems always seem to be posing questions. They’re not exactly inquiries, though. In this entire collection, she uses the pronoun “I” only three times, preferring “you.” They’re more like amused realizations of previously hidden links between things “far beyond anything / we would have said / connects,” as she writes in “The Fabric of Life.”

Though often playfully delineated, there is a certain aspect of the ominous in some of these poems. One gets the sense that Ryan is aware of baleful things lurking at the peripheries of language, and hints at them when she can, as in this poem:

AMONG ENGLISH VERBS

Among English verbsto die is oddest in its
eagerness to be dead,
immodest in its
haste to be told—
a verb alchemical
in the head:
one speck of its gold
and a whole life’s lead.

When last was a simple pun so foreboding and sad?

You may have noticed an unusual, irregular tendency to rhyme in the poems so far. Well, amid odd logic and precise imagery, Kay Ryan uses a technique she calls “recombinant rhyme,” which, though perhaps not originated by her, surely reaches its apex in her employment. She explains it best in this interview with the Paris Review, saying “When I started writing nobody rhymed—it was in utter disrepute. Yet rhyme was a siren to me. I had this condition of things rhyming in my mind without my permission. Still I couldn’t take end-rhyme seriously, which meant I had to find other ways—I stashed my rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middles—the front of one word would rhyme with the back of another one, or one word might be identical to three words,” and “by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.”

Here’s a final poem that well exemplifies this lovely slanted approach to rhyming, as well as her habit of refurbishing old sayings:

YOUR FACE WILL STICK

However bland we all
begin when picked
from the common
stock of cherubim,
your face will stick.
There will be
a spot at which
you hear the click.
Your baby ears—
pink shells—will
prick, your look grow
pixieish or dour,
fixed upon the
inner notch or
catch you can’t resist,
like clocks set up
to strike the hour.

For me, W. D. Snodgrass is the poet that started it all. I was sixteen years old, browsing the used book sale basement of my (now defunct) local library. “Snodgrass,” I thought. “That’s a funny name.” I pulled a maroon copy of his Selected Poems off the shelf, opened it up, and read something I must have liked. I don’t even really remember which poem it was, but the book went home with me and I began reading poetry on my own for the first time ever.

Maybe I’ll never know exactly what about his poetry reached me that day. I suspect that his style, which later came to be known as “confessional” (a label he rightfully despised), appealed to the angsty imagination proper to a boy of sixteen. That is not to say Snodgrass writes juvenile verse, only to say that was how I understood him at the time. At any rate, it was reading Snodgrass that prompted me to start writing my own poetry. As bad as those early poems of mine were, they were heartfelt, loyal imitations, and it is not difficult to perceive the Snodgrass influence in my own work to this day.

This is not the volume of selected works I obtained in the library years ago, but I distinctly remember reading some of the poems in this collection over and over again in my room or out on the lawn. I got this book at the VNSA sale – a signed first edition for $5.00. It was exciting, I admit, to see his inky signature inside the cover.

Here’s a poem I loved way back when for what I thought at the time was its accusatory tone towards brutal, hypocritical modern man:

INQUEST

Under the lamp your hands do not seem red.
What if the vicious histories didn’t lie
And, in good time, might cover you with shame?—
You seldom hope to see yourself as dead.

How can you guess what vices on your head
Might shine like dead wood for some distant eye?
Of course you have your faults; you make no claim
To sainthood, but your hands do not look red.

It’s no crime to be envied or well fed;
You aimed at no man’s life. Who would deny
Yours is the human and the normal aim?
You scarcely want to see yourself as dead.

Only last week the commentators said
Not even foreign generals need die
For circumstantial crimes. You would proclaim
Your own guilt if you saw your own hands red.

If you were hungry, who’d give up his bread
Without a fight? A person has to try
To feed himself; earn his own wealth and fame;
Nobody wants to see himself as dead.

Still, men go back to wars. They’re not misled
By the old lies. They know the reasons why.
When you can’t praise the world your world became
And see no place where your own hands are red,

It must be someone, then—how have they fled
The justice you had hoped you could apply?
You’ve hanged your enemies, shown up their game,
So now you don’t dare see yourself as dead

And things lose focus. You can lie in bed
Repeating Men do starve. Their children cry.
They really cry. They do not cry your name.
Go back to sleep, your hands do not feel red.

Or sit in some dark newsreel to be led
Through barbed wire and the white dead piled boot-high.
Your palms sweat; you feel just about the same.
Your last hope is to see yourself as dead

And yet you did not bleed when those were bled.
The humans carry knives. “It is not I!”
The screen goes blank, you see no one to blame.
Till you endure to see yourself as dead
Your blood in your own hand would not seem red.

I was reading a lot of Walker Percy at the time. (Lancelot, Lost in the Cosmos – I know, I know, too soon, too soon.) Poems like this lent legitimacy to my at-the-time anger at the world, and I was simply not yet capable of recognizing what now seems more like self-recriminating satire. I love the poem no less today, though I think of it now as a dark illumination of human nature by means of the poet’s gradual examination of himself. Now it reminds me of Zosima speaking of the man who “knows that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all,” except this man is having trouble admitting it.

One of the things I love about W. D. Snodgrass is his mastery of irregular yet unobtrusive end rhyme. I’m very annoyed by poetry in which the right word or the right rhythm has been sacrificed for the sake of a clumsy end rhyme. A great example of irregular end rhyme in After Experience is “Lobsters in the Window,” but you’ll have to go find that one yourself, because I want to show you this poem a little more:

LEAVING THE MOTEL

Outside, the last kids holler
Near the pool: they’ll stay the night.
Pick up the towels; fold your collar
Out of sight.

Check: is the second bed
Unrumpled, as agreed?
Landlords have to think ahead
In case of need,

That sooner or later others
Would accidentally find.
Check: take nothing of one another’s
And leave behind

Your license number only,
Which they won’t care to trace;
We’ve paid. Still, should such things get lonely,
Leave in their vase

An aspirin to preserve
Our lilacs, the wayside flowers
We’ve gathered and must leave to serve
A few more hours;

That’s all. We can’t tell when
We’ll come back, can’t press claims;
We would no doubt have other rooms then,
Or other names.

You could read that aloud to someone in a natural cadence and they’d never suspect it rhymed at the end. Wonderful! I also think this is a good example of a poem that seeks out and provokes feelings difficult to identify without oversimplification. Snodgrass writes personal poetry well; not too wry, not too simple, not too shrewd, not too naive. His writing is a fusion of images and impressions that convey personal experience without sentimentality.

Do I enjoy his poetry now as much as I did when I was younger? I do not know how to answer that question. I want to say not quite, but that’s not the whole story. I read him differently now, and I do not like all the same poems best that I used to, but my appreciation for Snodgrass has perhaps even grown, in a way. Even though I’ve moved on to favor other styles of poetry, and have discovered many poets whose work I prefer to read, there’s something singular and familiar about returning to poems by Snodgrass. I experience a sense of recognition, and the feeling that he is speaking directly to me, in language I am particularly disposed to understand. I think he gets me. And furthermore, I owe Mr. Snodgrass my gratitude for being the poet to initiate me.

After Experience culminates in a series of translations. I will end with this one:

“ALS DU MICH EINST . . .”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

You found me, not so long ago
When I was small, so small;
I bloomed, then, like a lindenbough
Silent in you, that’s all.

I was so small, I had no name
And dwindled longingly
Until you said I was too great
For any name to be.

I feel now I am one within
Myth, May and the main sea;
Grown heavy as scent of wine within
Your soul, now, that contains me.

I’ve had a great first month. It turns out that reading poetry knowing I’ll be writing about it means I read it more closely. I worried such an intention would sully the reading experience, but I think it has only enhanced it. I’m paying closer attention to the poems. I hope you have enjoyed the entries so far, and found some new poets too.

I was surprised to learn that this is Aaron Baker’s first book. It sure didn’t feel like one. It is set in Baker’s childhood, when from the ages of six to ten he lived with his missionary parents among the Kuman people in the Chimbu province of Papua New Guinea, a place in the world so far removed from modernity that wars between neighboring tribes are still fought with bows and arrows.

Reading the description on the back of the book did not produce in me any great expectations for its quality. I admit I expected poetry subordinated to some trite ideological gimmick. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As I often do when I open a book of poems in a bookstore, I read the first poem first. Here it is, and here’s why this book left with me:

CHIMBU WEDDING

When the villagers stake out a hundred pigs
and two men wade in with clubs,
watch how they float, cold as light out of heaven,
above the scene. When the pigs scream
and buckle with their skulls caved in,
remember that not one thing in this world
will be spared. Not one leaf. Not one
hair on a child’s head. See the women
hauling rocks to the fire-pits,
the boys kneeling to collect blood
in banana leaves, and think of St. Peter’s
vision: cloven-hoofed creatures descending
on a sheet, the sky saying “Take, eat.”
Learn to sit in the smoke with hunger sated
as children play with bladders they’ve inflated
like balloons. Learn a new language
for fellowship, and when you walk home
through the fields see if you can translate
the gloam-wrapped mountain’s whisper
as Come. Then, if there is a place
prepared for the saints, you will know
which way to turn at the crossroads.
You will not trouble the angel at the garden
gate for a way past her sword. You will
not remember what blood washed you clean.

These visceral specifics are about as far from trite as a poet could get. I feel like anything I could say about the poem as a whole would be an oversimplification: the poet blends Christian and native religion, the poet imbues his grown eye with the vision of his childhood sight, the poet uses violence as an occasion for grace. I will say that this poem’s complexity cannot be paraphrased, and that it left me with a curious feeling of uncertainty. I like it.

Many of Baker’s poems in this collection are highly narrative, and as such, they pay careful and continuous attention to the highland wilderness setting. Everywhere are taban trees, birds of paradise, cicadas, mosquitos, bamboo, snakes, bees, pigs, men and the children of men. At all times the reader is aware of being in an unfamiliar place, even when what is described is made somehow not to seem very strange. In Mission Work, the land itself is made to seem alien, haunted by ancient spirits, and yet still a thoroughly human realm occupied by human lives and pastimes. The poems worked well upon my imagination and I often felt transported.

The modernized, outside world is only present in the form of stories and curious remnants, as in this poem:

THE ZERO IN THE BRANCHES

Between wars, the old wars brood over our bodies.
Stunned — having once fed so well —
they drift toward sleep as they starve.

Look: high in the canopy, forty years
since it fell almost to earth, the fuselage
hangs, its Rising Sun a circle of rust.

Vines spill like a Gorgon’s hair
from the cockpit,
birds nest in the guns,

and from the wings, tree spiders spin
sunlight out of hatred from heaven.
May it never reach earth. May it hang there

forever so we can come, as often as needed,
to let its strange peace come over us
when we think of the skeleton slumped

in a moldering uniform over the shattered
yoke, the tree-snakes pouring over the jaw
like an unsilenceable, unlistened-to tongue.

If I taught a poetry class to high school students, I’d be eager to give them this poem to read and discuss. (That’s meant as a compliment.) It’s begging for discussion. Why the allusion to Medusa? What is the hatred from heaven? Why the use of the word “yoke?” What are the old wars? The oldest war? Baker holds the poem in as much tension between word and image as the fuselage is held between sky and earth.

I highly recommend this book of poems. Besides his close attention to environment and spirit, Baker permits a distinctly mythological element to permeate his remembered world, influenced by both Biblical events and a tribal sorcery akin almost to voodoo. Some of the most prominent poems in the collection, too long to reproduce here – “Commission,” “Second Genesis,” “Darkness Legend,” (a prosy poem about an eighteenth century volcano’s fallout which, in my opinion, is the best in the book) and “Highlands Mission” are all rich in the language and imagery of an ancient cosmos somehow both pagan and baptismal, whose magical happenings are bound up inextricably in human life and death.

I’ll end with one such, about the discovery of a cavern full of human bones, in which the visible world is depicted as a cave of the dead:

There are probably as many definitions of poetry as there are poets, but one of my favorites is D.H. Lawrence’s account of poetry as “an act of attention.” I have always taken this to mean both attention to the thing one is writing about and attention to the form of the writing. I thought for some time that only the thing itself was concrete, and the form of the writing was rather a representation, but Eric Pankey’s Oracle Figures has me rethinking that position. He seems to be insisting, in poem after poem, that both the reality and the writing are concrete representations – in other words, when he writes about fox tracks on a sandbank, or a maple leaf, or digging a sliver out with a needle, he represents in writing what is already representing in reality deeper, underlying movements of the world. His verses are full of weaving and vanishing, flames and shadows, seeming and being.

I’ll try to explain myself. When I picked up this book last month, the first poem I read was the first poem in the collection:

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE FICTIVE SPACE

I open my eyes and a season passes:
A single moth wing shudders on the sill.
The gate cannot open into the overgrown grass.

But the way, lit by foxfire and firefly,
By the flint-flash of grit at the pearl’s heart,
Is a past words cannot return to history,

To what the swallows inscribe on the air,
And here, on the outskirts of memory,
I look off again into that distance,

As if into a future, the lightning opening
Before my eyes like Scripture.
The equation at hand can be proven

By the spiral descent of the fishhawk,
By the curve of a tiger-lily’s stalk.
Yet all I see is surface glare,

An afterlife of the afterimage.

I was immediately pleased by the quiet, meditative quality of Pankey’s images, and after reading more of the poems, I became convinced that he would add to Lawrence’s description that poetry is also an act of divination by natural means. The movements we observe in natural things become signs of a great undercurrent, a “way, lit by foxfire and firefly,” a way perhaps composed of light itself, not a path exactly, but a way things are.

He is also deeply concerned with the relationship between things as they are and things as we name them in poetry. Consider some lines from the sectioned title poem “Oracle Figures”:

There is that moment
In the quarried dark of late winter
When a word begins to adhere to its object.

That moment, as all moments, is transitory.

These lines bring to my mind St. Ignatius of Loyola’s compositio locii, the composition of place which he says is the starting point of proper meditation. This is perfectly comparable to the poet’s contemplation of a time-and-place image as he writes. From the same poem:

If I squint my eyes I can see the floating world where all
forms are born.

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek aside concerns the poet, who looks on the substantial impermanent world in hopes of seeing that-which-is-behind-all-things shine through. The poet’s act of attention, furthermore, culminates in re-presenting to others the images he contemplates, as Pankey hints in “Improvisation”:

Beneath the chandelier, a single wooden chair with a
braided velvet cord draped over its arms. The poem is not
the chair, but the reconfigured function of the chair: to
be seen.

This notion of poetry’s ability to transform mere objects into objects of vision, meant to be seen, informs many more of the poems in this book. Here is an example which illustrates one of the book’s common symbols; the image of the world as an overlaid map, with the territory of the unseen world both a place of mystery and an object of longing. From the fifth section of “Shelter”:

For so long, I looked and stared,

Believing the out-there would reveal a glimpse
That might dislodge this aphasia.
A quandary of crows above the wood’s one path

Caws a cartography of elsewhere,
An ægis under which I walk.

There is much, much more in this collection I want to show you, but I’ll restrict myself to one more poem. “Tableau” is situated toward the very end of the collection, after the poems have gotten gradually more visionary, and brings together many of Pankey’s images into something I consider truly beautiful. Think, before you read it, on the possible glimpse of something unchanging which Hans Urs von Balthasar said “causes worldly beauty gradually to become metaphysical, mythical and revelatory splendor.”

TABLEAU

As if to repair the apparent,
Or anneal with the flame of a gaze,
I look out, behold the pied and patched,
A redwing blackbird like a shuttle
Slipped between threads of shadow and light,
The leaves shuffled, the leaves unshuffled,
The barbican of the marsh cedar,
The talcum smear of the late day-moon.
As if by noting here the pieces,
The peculiar, the particulars,
The immanent might disclose itself.